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LIONEL ABEL
to their dreams. We watch them don these costumes as they pre–
pare for peculiar satisfactions. It is to be noted that in watching
them change before our eyes from their uncostumed reality to
the bravura figures they become when arrayed to act, we get an
altogether new feeling of the reality-not of character-but of
costume. Seldom does it happen in any play, modem or classical,
that costume means much to the audience. In most revivals of
Elizabethan dramas, costume is actually an impediment to our
acceptance of the situation or the scene. Hence directors have
experimented with doing the old plays in modem dress. But there
is something poetical in costume as such, and the theatre would be
disadvantaged by a complete loss of it. In
The Balcony,
Genet
has done nothing less than restore the poetical value of costume
to the stage. For the fact is that when we see costumes being put
on, we can accept them as the necessary garb for the characters,
whereas if the characters come on the stage fully costumed, we
think at once of the work of the director and the costume designer.
The effect Genet achieves here by the metatheatrical device of
having us present at the dressing up of his personages is akin
to certain characteristic effects of Pirandello. I am thinking, for
example, of the scene in
Tonight We Improvise,
in which an old
man rehearses his death-scene; here Pirandello is able to touch us
with the feeling of the real imminence of death in a way he never
would have been able to do by showing us a man really dying.
We tend to think of real blood on the stage as a fake; now the
magic of metatheater can make stage blood seem real; at least
we can think of it as real for a moment and without feeling that
we have been taken in.
Outside the brothel a revolution is taking place. In a remark–
able scene, cut, I understand, from the version of
The Balcony
now running in The Circle in the Square, the revolutionaries
discuss a bit of theater designed to impose their aims on the
populace. Should they not make of Chantal, a prostitute from
Madame Irma's "Palace of Illusions" a saint of their revolution?
If
they were to kill her and claim that she fell as a martyr to
their cause, would not her image impell the people to victory? But
what good is our victory if come by that way, protests one of the
revolutionaries, "it already has a dose of clap." The point
is
